Facebook's Zuckerberg is nation's No. 2 charitable donor

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with wife Priscilla Chan, donated almost $500 million to a charitable foundation in 2012.

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Zuckerberg and wife, Priscilla Chan, gave about $500 million to a charitable foundation last year

Chronicle of Philanthropy releases its list of most generous givers in 2012

Warren Buffett tops the list; hedge-fund creator John Arnold and his wife, Laura, are third

Microsoft's Paul Allen, Google's Sergey Brin and wife, Anne Wojcicki, round out the top five

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and his wife were the second-biggest charitable donors in the United States last year, appearing behind only billionaire Warren Buffett on a list of the nation's most generous philanthropists.

Zuckerberg, along with wife Priscilla Chan, gave roughly half a billion dollars ($498.8 million) to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation issues grants for a host of causes in the San Francisco area. In 2012, its charitable causes ranged from programs to teach immigrants English, to groups providing food and shelter to the needy, to funds for victims of the California wildfires.

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"Together, we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next. I'm hopeful we'll be able to have as positive an impact in our next set of projects," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page at the time.

Allen's institute is devoted to research on how the human brain works, particularly in regard to health and disease. It is a nonprofit medical research organization launched in 2003 and which Allen compares, in scope, to the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project.

Brin and Wojcicki's foundation donates to a number of causes which, in 2012, included women's and environmental issues and a foundation devoted to curbing poverty. The couple also donated nearly $33 million last year to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.

Zuckerberg, 27, and Brin, 39, contributed to a trend noted by the chronicle -- and likely spurred by the emergence of the youth-oriented tech field. Three of the year's top five donors were under 40. The other, No. 3 on the list, was hedge-fund creator John Arnold, who is 38, and his wife, Laura.